Source-code editor

In 1985, Mike Cowlishaw of IBM created LEXX while seconded to the Oxford University Press. LEXX used live parsing and used color and fonts for syntax highlighting. IBM's LPEX (Live Parsing Extensible Editor) was based on LEXX and ran on VM/CMS, OS/2, OS/400, Windows, and Java

Although the initial public release of vim was in 1991, the syntax highlighting feature was not introduced until version 5.0 in 1998.